ORO – Displaying Bibliometric & Altmetric Information

ORO now displays bibliometrics information for individual items alongside the (already existing) Altmetrics. So what do they mean!

Altmetrics from Altmetric

Altmetrics (Alternative Metrics – geddit?) are a suite of metrics that can be used to measure the level of attention a research paper has gained across a range of platforms. These include:

Citations in Wikipedia and policy documents

Mentions on blogs

Mainstream media coverage

Bookmarks on Mendeley

Mentions on Twitter

Altmetrics provide a useful insight on where research outputs are gaining attention outside of the scholarly literature.

Altmetric use a characteristic Donut Badge which is used to visualise the metrics. Clicking on the Altmetric Donut in ORO will send you to the Altmetric page for the paper where you can identify each of the mentions the research output has accrued.

Citations from Dimensions

Four different types of citation metrics are displayed:

Total Citations – different datasets have different coverage and the total citations in one dataset will differ from another. The total citations from the Dimensions dataset will differ from other datasets (e.g. Google Scholar or Scopus)

Recent Citations – the number of citations received in the last 2 calender years

Field Citation Ratio (FCR) – a measure of the relative citation performance of a paper in its field, as categorised using the Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classification (ANZSRC). Where the normalized value is 1. i.e. if a paper has a FCR of over 1 it has a higher than average number of citations for it’s group. Papers less than 2 years old do not have an FCR.

Relative Citation Ratio (RCR) – a measure of the relative citation performance of a paper in its field as measured by the subject area of the papers that cite it.Where the normalized value is 1. i.e. if a paper has a RCR of over 1 it has a higher than average number of citations for it’s group. Papers less than 2 years old do not have an RCR.

Clicking on the Dimensions badge will send you to the Dimensions page for that paper where you can see where the citations have come from and further detail and contextualisation.

About Chris

Chris looks after Open Research Online (ORO) on a day to day basis. He has worked in this role since 2011 and can advise on using ORO to maximise dissemination of research outputs and Open Access publishing generally.